Does the Lightning striJce before it becomes visible ? 143 



o( Baktous, 10,321 feet high, on the 25th, the 30th and 31st 

 of August 1826. On these occasions, they experienced rain, 

 hail, and snow ; the lightning possessed extreme vividness, and 

 the thunder followed instantaneously. On the 31st the light- 

 ning fell upon a white partridge which the guides had hung 

 with a piece of pack-thread, upon a stake of wood. The end of 

 this stake was found charred ; a stripe of feathers also had 

 been removed from the partridge from the head to the tail. 

 From the village of Arrens the storm had appeared so violent 

 that the travellers on the peak were never expected back again. 



Does the Lightning strike before it becomes visible ? 



I much question if any natural philosopher has, for some 

 years, hazarded publicly to propose the question at the head 

 of this section. During this period it has been supposed that 

 nothing could, by possibility, be more rapid than lightning. 

 A well determined velocity of eighty thousand leagues a 

 second, appeared so astonishing, that the imagination never 

 ventured to think of going further. The experiments, how- 

 ever, of Mr Wheatstone will probably effect a change upon 

 this point. These have, in truth, I will not say demonstrated, 

 but they have at least led us to conceive the possibility of even 

 greater velocities than that of light ; and that, in a substance 

 whose identity with lightning, a hundred comparisons tend to 

 establish. The suspicion then announced, at the head of this 

 chapter, merits investigation in a theoretical point of view. 

 Meteorology must gain by the inquiry ; and I imagine the pro- 

 blem has a relation, on some points, to physiology. Finally, it 

 appears to me that many timid individuals will be spared many 

 poignant moments during thunder-storms, were it proved that 

 nothing is to be apprehended when the flash has been seen. 



Mr Thomas Olivey, a farmer in Cornwall, who was knocked 

 unconscious to the ground by a fearful thunderbolt on the 

 20th of December 1752, so little heard the noise, or perceived 

 the light of the meteor, that in coming to himself at the end of 

 a quarter of an hour, his first inquiry was, Wlio had struck 

 him? A man was struck with lightning hear Bitche, on the 

 11th of June 1757. After being for a time asphyxiated, he 

 was asked, on returning to consciousness, by the Abbe Chappe, 



